Well-traveled Davis stays true to his UD roots
Kevon Davis was on the road before he had a chance to check the roster.
It was a standard recruiting trip for Davis, then an assistant basketball coach for Cal Poly. He covered large swaths of the Southwest as part of the Mustangs’ recruiting, both high schools and junior colleges. It wasn’t until Davis was close to his destination — Cochise College in Arizona, some
10 miles north of the Mexican border — that he saw a familiar location on the roster: Upper Darby.
In this case, it fell under “hometown” for a Cochise player, guard and 2018 grad Jalun Trent. Some
2,300 miles from their alma mater, the last thing Davis expected to stumble upon was a fellow Royal.
“I was doing my homework on the roster and I saw Upper Darby, and called him (Royals coach Bob Miller) up and he told me, ‘yeah he’s here, this and that,’” Davis said this week. “He (Trent) was shocked. I walked into the gym, and he’s not thinking a guy from Cal Poly is from Upper Darby. So I go up to him and I said, ‘I’m from Upper Darby, I just talked to Coach Miller.’ And I still remember his face and how shocked he was.
“You just never know with basketball and the people you can run into and where you can end up.”
Davis has ended up a lot of places since graduating from Upper Darby in 2006. After a playing career at Harcum and West Chester, he’s lived the itinerant lifestyle of someone climbing the basketball coaching ladder. After four years as an assistant at
Harcum, his travels have led to Casper College in Wyoming, to Cal Poly on the Central Coast and now Ottumwa, Iowa at Indian Hills Community College, one of the top JUCO programs.
For someone who played only one year of varsity at Upper Darby, Davis has made basketball his life.
Davis, a 6-2 forward whose athleticism and effort exceeded his physical gifts, played only as a senior, in part because of an illness that cost him his junior year. He was part of stellar JV teams at Upper Darby, the core of which would win the Central League in 2007 after Davis graduated.
Ask long-time Upper Darby coach Bob Miller, though, and Davis on-court achievements are but part of what he heaps praise on.
“He was such a hard worker,” Miller said. “Whenever he had a chance, he was a gym rat, he was in the gym working on his game. … He was hooked. A guy like him, you love it. And once you get hooked on it, there’s no way you’re not going to keep doing it.”
Davis was a second-team AllCentral pick, averaging 10.6 points and 10.0 rebounds per game. His Royals won 21 games, including a District 1 Class AAAA playoff game in which Davis scored 23 points, but fell one win shy of states. Their season included a win over Lower Merion, which would win the PIAA AAAA title. Davis provided the go-ahead bucket, an off-balance layup, in the final minute of that game, plus two clutch free throws to ice it.
Davis’s playing travails benefit him as a coach. He’s carved out a name at JUCOs full of talented players with some strike against them that delays them reaching the Division I level, guys whose basketball journeys haven’t all been smooth sailing. Davis gets that.
“You always remember that experience as a player, so it’s good as a coach, you understand guys and are able to help them through things not going their way, not having immediate success,” he said. “It’s easier to observe somebody not playing as much when you actually understand it and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel that they don’t see yet. I think that’s valuable. As a player, I always worked extremely hard and played really hard, and that’s stuff you try to instill in guys, to bring that effort every day.”
Davis doesn’t forget his roots. He appreciates how far basketball has taken him – he describes it as “living in four different worlds,” from Philly to Wyoming to California to Iowa. Miller said Davis checks in regularly on the program. Miller’s only lament is that Davis’s career has taken him so far away as to make him less visible than if he were coaching locally. But whenever he’s in town, Davis is generous with his time in speaking to the latest crop of Royals.
“He’s a genuinely good person,” Miller said. “And to have someone like him representing Upper Darby, there’s a lot of kids at Upper Darby that are great kids and go unnoticed, and he’s one of those. It’s just fantastic. …
“You wish he was coaching somewhere local, though, but whenever he’s around, he comes in and he tells them, ‘Look, I was in the same place you are.’ Basketball was his means to an end in college, and now he’s been at the D1 level and all that.”
Indian Hills is one of the top JUCOs in the nation, a soft landing spot after Davis’s three seasons with Cal Poly, the last as a full-time assistant. When coach Joe Callero was fired at the end of the 2019 season by the Division I program, Davis went with him.
Indian Hills isn’t short on talent. The team went 30-3, earning the No. 2 seed in the NJCAA
Division I tournament before it was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The roster includes players from four countries and six states, seven of whom are pledged to Division I schools next year — including Kansas-bound Tyon Grant-Foster and Oregon State commit Maurice Calloo.
For a coach like Davis with aspirations to return to Division I, Indian Hills is a great place to burnish his credentials and plot his next move.
“I try to take it one step at a time,” Davis said. “I think for now at this place, you want to get back to the Division I level. We’ve already had seven guys signed from this year’s class, so you’re in touch with a lot of guys coming to the gym, not just where your kids go but people recruiting us all year and being in contact.
“Definitely for me, the next goal professionally is to become a Division I assistant again. I got a taste of it …. I want to get back to a situation where I get a few years to build and see where it takes me from there.”